Donatello, Ascension with Christ giving the Keys to St Peter, c.1430. Victoria & Albert Museum, London
Visitors to the V&A’s Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance are greeted by a young David standing proudly with the head of Goliath at his feet. As a symbol of the city of Florence and commissioned originally for the Cathedral – only to be quickly repurposed as a civic emblem for the Palazzo della Signoria – the statue perfectly introduces us to Donatello placed at the heart of Florentine self-image.
David is flanked on the left by three sculptures of the Virgin with Child – a scene we can thank Donatello for popularising – and on his right by a reliquary from the studio of Ghiberti which shows early signs of Donatello’s craftmanship. Pushing past these, the rest of the exhibition demonstrates the sculptor’s prowess in a range of techniques and media, anchored round his examples of the portrait bust, low relief carving, and his tender depictions of the Virgin and Child.
The set-up is a simple one – alongside every example of a Donatello, two or three works of his contemporaries provide further context. Aside from the obvious ‘beefing out’ of an exhibition which must make do with what it can get from collections around the world, it shows us Donatello’s pivotal impact in the revival of classical style and how he transformed the visual language of the Church.
In the main body of the exhibition, the emphasis is on how Donatello’s early trade of goldsmithing informed his craft as a sculptor; his use of fine lines and complex perspective to create depth on even the shallowest of reliefs. Terracotta models for the base panel of the Forzori Altar are displayed alongside a delicately engraved gem from about 20 BC, which used techniques with which he would have been familiar. This focus on understanding his craftmanship and displaying works at various stages of their creation nods appropriately to the raison d’etre of the V&A as a crafts and design-centred museum.
The exquisite “Ascension with Christ giving the Keys to St Peter” (above) is offered as one of the most masterful examples of stiacciato relief combining the two unrelated biblical events with a tremendous sense of depth. The Apostles crowd round the ascending Christ with Jerusalem rendered faintly in the far distance. It is worth the squint. Meanwhile, portrait busts form a shimmering line-up of the great and the good. Donatello’s shining reliquary of San Rossore, cast in bronze, gilded and silver plated, looks out at us with a furrowed brow and a vein throbbing on his forehead. The chiselled decoration combined techniques from his days as a goldsmith and the expressive treatment of the face confirms the piece as a seminal work in the development of the Renaissance portrait bust.
The saints have very much come to life at the Master’s treatment. Beside San Rossore, we are presented with a plainer, but no less expressive, bust of what was probably the Lord Mayor of Florence with high cheeks and a sharply turned head. Here we have an example of the sculptor’s innovative use of characterisation to revive the classical form of commemorating an important individual. It is made clear that Donatello’s prowess could be turned to serve and update the spiritual artistic needs of the Church, as well as those of contemporary power and politics – and this at a time when the boundary was often blurred. Throughout the exhibition we see numerous examples of commissions by the Medicis or donations of religious scenes to their allies: as in the later example of the Bronze Crucifixion relief which was likely a gift from the artist to Roberto Martell, a Medici ally.
There is plenty to see, but the curator could not be accused of overcrowding the space. The works have room to breathe and the various sculptures on display appear to be in conversation with one another. An enormous, gilded head of God the Father by Beltramino, created for the apse of Milan Cathedral, looks sternly through the rest of the room from its corner pediment. It casts its eyes past the reliquary busts, and over the playful spiritelli. The wonderfully eccentric Attis-Amorino dances ecstatically in the middle of the other bronzes with his bare buttocks shining out above his falling trousers. It asserts its purely classical credentials almost in defiance of the more sobering religious themes which dominate the exhibition. Certainly, it jars uncomfortably with the towering crucifix from the High Altar of the Santo in Padua, with Christ’s head hanging down with exhaustion in his final moments.
In a later section exploring devotion and emotion, the standout piece is not the large marble statue of John the Baptist, with his camel hair tunic seemingly fluttering before us – likely completed by Desiderio da Settignano, one of Donatello’s followers – but rather the smaller “Lamentation over the Dead Christ” from about 1455. It is a heart-rending scene in which the bronze is transformed by Donatello into soft flesh as the weeping women tear their hair out in grief. It is impossible to be unmoved by the scene and even in the more sterile setting of a museum space, his power to create devotional images to inspire empathy and bring us closer to God is palpable.
Not all of the works have perfect attribution, however. There exist only two depictions of the Virgin and Child for which an unbroken line of provenance exists; both of them take the form of a roundel. Scholarly weight falls behind the attribution of the other works exhibited. Many of Donatello’s reliefs were designed for replication, and for an artist whose work was so diligently studied and copied in his lifetime (and beyond) it is not surprising that some faithful facsimile might result in decades of debate. The infamous “Dudley Madonna”, for example, is displayed with the date as “possibly 1440-1530 or after about 1850”. This doesn’t detract from but rather adds another layer to the fascinating story of Donatello’s impact on sculpture throughout the last half millennia.
Poetically, the exhibition closes as it begins: with a statue of David. This time, it is one of the V&A’s plaster copies, cast in 1885. The original bronze resides in the Bargello. The lithe, youthful hero with his soft features was the first full male nude since antiquity and cements Donatello’s place as one of the greatest innovators of the early Renaissance. Looking through an open niche in this final section we can see the exhibition’s first David in profile standing in his gothic manner. It is a thoughtful touch that brings one’s initial impression of this work full circle, allowing viewsers to reflect on the all the pieces displayed one final time before heading off to lunch. This first exhibition of Donatello’s work by a major gallery in Britain is an effective summary that touches on every aspect of his virtuosity.
Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance is at the V&A until 11 June
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